Friedrich Ewald My Personal Website
Posts
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Fast feed processing in Ruby and Rails
While working on my current project, everypodcast, I needed to implement an RSS feed parser, mostly for iTunes RSS feeds. Initially I went with the builtin
RSSpackage from the standard library. When reading a lot of large XML feeds, I noticed that parsing those feeds takes anywhere from 0.5 to over 30 seconds. At the same time the process was using a 100% CPU. After some searching I found Feedjira. With this, it now takes on average 0.5 seconds and at most 1.5 seconds to parse even the longest feeds. Furthermore it has dedicated support for different types of RSS feeds, I highly recommend it. -
Rails testing with static server
I wanted to test some part of my application that performs HTTP requests against a different website. Now, for testing, I didn’t want to perform actual outside HTTP calls because they tend to become flaky if the internnet becomes unstable or when the remote resource is not available. Another reason, why I didn’t want to use the rails server and their static files, is that I didn’t want to serve those files in production. So I decided to write my own static file server.
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New York Times Story Portrait
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Improving Search Engine Optimization
As the final step in this very small series I tried improving the SEO (search engine optimization) score for my start page. I started out with a good score of 92. As usual, my goal was 100.
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Improving Website Accessibility
Continuing from before, I wanted to improve the accessibility on this website as much as possible. The initial Lighthouse run gave me a score of around 82, which is not too bad, but I definitely wanted to improve it.
